“Who do you write for?”
Orhan Pamuk in the IHT on the question he has heard most:
In the mid-’70s, when I first decided to become a novelist, the question reflected the widely held philistine view that art and literature were luxuries in a poor non-Western country troubled by premodern problems.There was also the suggestion that someone “as educated and cultivated as yourself” might serve the nation more usefully as a doctor fighting epidemics or an engineer building bridges.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre gave credence to this view in the early 1970s when he said that he would not be in the business of writing novels if he were a Biafran intellectual.
